Thinking of my Dad recently. He worked a lot of labor jobs for very little money. Even though he was brilliant, he was one of the youngest of a dozen siblings with a mom who died early, and no one even considered that he might be able to go to college, so after 8th grade it was the Technical High School and the army. From then on, any job that could give him insurance and a week or two of paid vacation a year was a job to be grateful for. The city water company, a sawmill, the wallboard factory. Well when I started teaching he was at the wallboard plant and in the lab, making test samples of gypsum. And he saw a cap on each end of the rolls of paper they used. That Easter if 1990, he noticed that two caps placed against each other made an egg shape, so he used them as molds and so he made a bunch of gypsum eggs for my class to paint. Only we didn’t get them in time and each time I noticed that box it was never near Easter again. Until this year, in shelter in place mode with his great granddaughter, I finally have started painting Eggs.
